Saint Paul School has a unique place in the history of education in Macao. With a population of about 3,000 students supported by a faculty of about 230 members, the school offers one of the most advanced educational programs in the region.
Empowering Tomorrow's Leaders
When the Macau-based Saint Paul School initiated its visionary plan of a digital learning classroom in 2010 to drive student engagement, creativity, and productivity, it unveiled one of the largest ‘One Student One PC’ programs in Asia. After evaluating a number of PC vendors, the school found the Thinkpad Yoga convertible laptops from Lenovo to be the right fit for its long-term digitalization goals. For seven consecutive years now, Lenovo has been the PC vendor of choice for Saint Paul School, and the school still believes that the latest ThinkPad Yoga series offers the market’s best price to performance ratio for student PCs.
Business Challenge
The school started its journey to digital education in 2011 with the launch of its ‘Classroom 2012’ program, which continues to progressively integrate ICT technologies and deploy innovative tools in the school’s educational processes to this day.
This landmark initiative comprised of two phases. The first phase involved building an appropriate infrastructure, including tasks such as hardware acquisition, and systems and applications deployment for enabling digital access to information.
This established a school-wide digital learning environment to support the goals in the second phase of the project – to optimize learning and teaching outcomes through the digital integration of technology into lesson plans.
“The objective of the first phase of the project was to provide students, teachers, and parents with the media and network to access learning resources, use e-learning tools, activate collaboration, and change the school culture. Thus, we needed to deploy a new school-wide end-user computing platform for teachers and students,” explains Manel Machado, Director of Academic Technology at Saint Paul School.
Lenovo Solution
‘One Student One PC’ was a key goal in the first phase of the project. To achieve this, the school identified an array of requirements for choosing the device best suited for its blended learning classroom that also complemented the user-behavior of its students.
After much consideration, the school chose the Thinkpad Yoga convertible series, which combines both tablet and laptop functionalities. “We required a durable, lightweight and economical device with both a keyboard and a writing pad. As most of the users are students, we preferred a big screen to facilitate easy reading and a stylus pen for writing and drawing, plus a Windows platform for doing homework. At that time, there were only two or three brands in the market providing similar functions. Only Lenovo’s Thinkpad Yoga met all our requirements and was the best fit for our needs,” continues Manel.
Since the launch of the program in 2011, the ThinkPad Yoga has been the key learning device for the school. This demonstrates how Lenovo consistently maintains its excellence in technology development and product innovation.
Although we review PC vendors every year, we haven’t found a better alternative in the market suitable for student use. Comparing product features, configuration, durability, cost and service, the ThinkPad Yoga offers an unrivaled price-to-performance advantage
Manel Machado
Director of Academic Technology
Saint Paul School
Business Impact
By using the ThinkPad Yoga to achieve its ‘One Student One PC’ goal, the school successfully transformed from ‘chalk and talk’ to an interactive, paperless digital learning classroom as early as 2011. The ‘Classroom 2012’ program has since been recognized as the first and the biggest in the region to embrace full-scale technology-assisted learning in a school environment.
“Through continuous technology upgrades, the latest ThinkPad Yoga provides an even more enjoyable user experience. Students can write, read and study on a single, lightweight portable device anytime, anywhere. Teachers can motivate kids with more lively and interactive e-learning tools. This flawless, high-performance convertible device also improves their productivity and increases opportunities to collaborate with students and parents,” says Manel.
He commends Lenovo for understanding that educational devices need to be priced to suit the limited IT budgets of a school. “Lenovo offers us very favorable terms. The price is very competitive. You could not buy a similar model at our price on the street.”
In addition, Lenovo also provides highly responsive, hassle-free services to the school, which operates on tight resources. “Lenovo has supported our PCs continuously for the past seven years. It is one of the few single-client service centers in Macau. It greatly enhances our service availability and reliability to users, and significantly offloads our administrative workload,” Manel adds.
Conclusion
Saint Paul School believes that digital transformation is not a one-time project with an expiry date. With the rise of educational technology and user demands, the school will continue to explore new opportunities to enhance its educational outcomes.
“We will keep on studying how to integrate new technology into our education - like exploring how Augmented Reality (AR) can be used to create immersive lessons that are fun and instructional and help with lesson understanding. When we find areas in the lesson plans that can be improved by integrating technology tools, we will always count on Lenovo’s support,” Manel remarks.
